Majorityrights Central > Category: Journalism

... Watch PBS from 9:00 pm to 10:30 pm on Wednesday, April 25.  That 90 minutes will actually save you time because you’ll never watch television news again - not even on PBS.

Four years ago on May 1, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln wearing a flight suit and delivered a speech in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner. He was hailed by media stars as a “breathtaking” example of presidential leadership in toppling Saddam Hussein. Despite profound questions over the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction and the increasing violence in Baghdad, many in the press confirmed the White House’s claim that the war was won. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neo-cons now;” NPR’s Bob Edwards said, “The war in Iraq is essentially over;” and Fortune magazine’s Jeff Birnbaum said, “It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context.”

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? “What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored,” says Moyers. “How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?”

On Wednesday, April 25 at 9 p.m. on PBS, a new PBS series BILL MOYERS JOURNAL premieres at a special time with “Buying the War,” a 90-minute documentary that explores the role of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

From Bill Moyers journal.

Leo McKinstry, a Belfast-born Protestant, has written a fair and honest article which you can read here.  Do include the thread, which is perhaps the most illuminating part.  Gratitude overflows, although of course it contains a quantity of wrong thinking (UKIP the only hope of the white working class!!).

Janice Turner is the kind of journalist who should never type the word, patriotism.  Or nation, or nationhood.  To state the obvious, she is a lady journalist, you see.  A woman ... a nice, emolient, “why can’t we all just get along?” sort of soft thingy.

In this morning’s Times she simpers, “Help, I think I’m a little Englander.”  But what she really delivered to the doorsteps of the, well yes, nation was a perfectly-honed if unwitting confirmation of my friend Fred Scrooby’s oft-stated view of her sex.

She is unaware that she can’t apprehend race, of course.  Not in its fullness.  For Janice, her homeland and the interests of its people can be only vaguely perceived through the medium of the economy.

This, then, is how she makes the patriotic case:-

... Does it matter that such a cherished British institution [she means Wimbledon 2006 - Ed] has shacked up with a foreign brand?  Lauren’s little polo ponies will trot out of the Wimbledon shop as sure as rain will fall. So he’s worth his £6 million deal.  And anyway, what is British fashion?  Our designers create from Parisian ateliers, their clothes are cut in Milan, sewn in China, shown in New York.  Get with the global economy, grannio, you may think.  Well, perhaps . . . except it just feels so wrong.

Likewise, as I glare at the Saharan patches on my lawn and read about Thames Water, which hiked up my bill on a promise to repair leaks but instead decided to award my hard-earned to its shareholders, my fury is compounded by the knowledge that my water is German-owned.  I keep imagining the executives of RWE — Thames’s parent company — relaxing by glistening swimming pools, amid verdant gardens.

Deep in the Ruhr or Rhine, they won’t get neighbours ear-bashing them about plants shrivelled by the hosepipe ban.  They won’t feel they have failed in their duty to their customers or to this country, because we are faceless, faraway citizens and this is a foreign country.  They don’t feel responsibility, let alone shame.  ... Am I a little Englander, a petty nationalist, an economic dinosaur because I loathe the idea of British utilities and infrastructure being foreign-owned?  In the global free market, the swirling, borderless world of international finance, why should it matter that the Spanish are about to buy Heathrow, Gatwick and five other British airports?  Or that 21 ports, including Hull, Southampton and Tilbury — accounting for a quarter of British seabourne traffic — will soon be controlled by a foreign consortium?  After all, much of our energy is already owned by French or American firms, or at any rate controlled by non-British shareholders.

... And so powerful and cross-party is the belief that liberalised markets mean the best company — regardless of nationality — gets the gig and provides the best value for the customer, it feels heresy to ask two simple questions: is this safe and is it undermining our sense of nationhood? I cannot answer the first. No politician has ever explained what happens if things turn sour with a country that owns our strategic installations: a bunch of power stations, say, or Mersey docks, now property of the people of Dubai. The British Government has already vowed that Russia’s state-owned Gazprom will not be allowed near our gas for fear it will use supplies as a political weapon, as it did in Ukraine. Yet we are expected to believe that all other foreign companies are benign, have only our interests at heart.

Now, at this juncture MR - if not Times - readers will be connecting the dots pretty damned quick.  So what has Janice to say of the surrendering of whole segments of our cities and towns to complete aliens?  Does she rail at the paucity of politicians, by which we must assume she means mainstream politicians, explaining that things will turn very sour racially?  People like us have, of course.  Several times.  But our politicos would rather eat sennapods and gunpowder for a week.

Ms Turner, it turns out, feels the same.  There seems to be a war going on inside her between her feminine emotion and her masculine reason.  Here she is zig-zagging towards an outcome, a synthesis of sorts:-

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The American feminist author and London-based journalist Lionel Shriver disappointed a few Guardian readers today with a classic rant against the Mexican invasion.

“I am obsessed with immigration,” she said.  She obviously meant it.  She railed against “the disappearing ink” of US immigration law, and ended:-

I was bemused to read this week that Mexico has an accelerating immigration problem. Many of the South and Central Americans teeming across its border with Guatemala are heading for the US. But a fair number are staying on in Mexico, where they take “the jobs Mexicans don’t want”. So many Mexicans have left for more lucrative jobs in el Norte that only the Guatemalans will pick mangoes in the baking sun for a few lousy pesos.

Furthermore, foreigners ploughing into Mexico are subject to the same fierce local resentment that brought outraged Mexicans out on America’s streets in April. The coordinator of the government-funded humanitarian organisation Grupo Beta declared, “This society does not see migrants as human beings, it sees them as criminals.” I was startled to learn that Mexico’s immigration law is far more stringent than America’s, even more stringent than the harsher laws now in limbo in the US Congress, over which Mexican president Vicente Fox has been so alarmed.

This is what I mean about double standards. The very same national populations that blithely regard the US as an extension of their own backyard get very stroppy indeed when foreigners start regarding their own countries with the same presumption.

Admittedly, this is a double standard in which American mythology has been complicit. Forever talking up the “melting pot” and our proud tradition as a “nation of immigrants”, US politicians can’t sabre-rattle over stricter immigration policies without sounding like hypocrites. The rest of the world doesn’t believe the US has the right to police its own borders; raised on all that “huddled masses yearning to be free” folderol, Americans don’t either. In short, the US has been helplessly victimised by its own bullshit.

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Today Sean O’Neill of The Times deigned to inform us that “Race killings are no longer a matter of black and white”.

Well, thank you very much, Sean.  But excuse me if I am unimpressed.  Race killings never were the sole preserve of white men.  Your headline neatly avoids that, and I wonder why.  Specifically, I wonder why you didn’t write a story headlined, “Who wants you to think that race killers are always white?”

The problem, I suppose, is that it has been journalists of both left and right who wanted this.  What purpose but the construction of a false public perception did the press feeding frenzy over the Lawrence and Walker murders serve?  The Marxist prescription of white guilt somehow became theirs, and they sought to make it ours.

They have no excuses.  The purpose and perniciousness of political correctness was well understood in America by 1992, and the term itself was quite possibly recycled from early Soviet communism by right-wing academics as early as 1980.  What serious journalist of the right anywhere has not debunked it since, and enjoyed himself hugely in the process?

All the more extraordinary, then, that these proud linguistic gladiators, these professional cynics and modern inquisitors should all come to crowd together on an extreme ideological outcrop way out left of human nature.

Let’s take a look at O’Neill’s article today.  The meat of it is this:-

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Mary Riddell is a spiteful, intellectally lazy Observer journalist, an egalitarian activist and, apparently, a believer in the dead Marxist, Stephen J Gould.  Today she has taken it upon herself to write a hate piece about Leeds University professor, Frank Ellis.

Ellis, you will recall, took it upon himself - not for the first time - to do what Drew Fraser did Down Under and inform the British public about racial differentials.  He is a doughty fighter, and has done the same public service in respect to the social effects of The Lawrence Inquiry.  His specialism is Russian and Slavonic Studies, upon which he has the soundest view imaginable - though one hardly likely to endear itself to Ms Riddell.

In her bitch-piece today she is, no doubt, reacting to Ellis’s success in getting his views across.  He knows perfectly well, of course, that the white population is thirsty for such insights and, too, that his notoriety on the Establishment Left is a threat to him professionally and personally.  He is, like Prof Fraser, a brave man for whom the collective cost of silence is greater than any cost to him of speaking out.  He has my admiration and, I don’t doubt, that of many others with no website on which to express it.  I admire his cheek, too.  Last week, Ms Riddell reports, he sent the Observer an “an email offering a resumé of his views and asking what we would pay him”.  He must have done it deliciously anticipating the mortification that would ensue among all those so fearful-progressive Observer folk.

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Treading ever nearer to saying the unsayable, the MSM’s only honest voice writes:-

... the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they’re the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.

And at the end of this chain of shades of grey is you.

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Two late-night murders dominated domestic news stories in yesterday’s and today’s British Mainstreams.  One was the vile stabbing of Richard Whelan by a fellow passenger on a London bus.  The victim was white, the murderer black.

The other, already the recipient of very much more wallpaper, is the shocking axe murder of Anthony Walker.  His was, apparently, a racist killing of a black by a white or whites.

It is clear that the murder of Anthony Walker, who we are sensitively informed was a “devout Christian” and a “talented athlete”, “A-level student” and wannabe “lawyer”, is the one that will run and run.  Evidently, the death of Richard Whelan, merely “a hospitality agent”, offers no such journalistically picturesque delights.

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